Community Summit 2026

Community Summit 2026 was a one-day conference at ICC Sydney, with talks programmed across three rooms running in parallel and a livestream of every room for remote attendees and the wider community. The brief was that the streaming experience needed to feel as polished as the in-room one, not the usual conference compromise where the home audience gets a wide locked-off camera and the chat is an afterthought.

The setup was three independent stream stacks (camera packages, audio routing, encoders, captioners) running in parallel, tied to a single timing reference so the recordings synced cleanly for post. Each room had its own production crew: a vision director, a camera operator on the keynote camera, an audio engineer running the broadcast mix separately from the in-room PA, and a stream producer watching the actual broadcast on a laptop to catch anything the in-room team wouldn’t notice.

Captioning was real-time, human, by an external CART team we’d worked with twice before. They captioned each room independently from their own dial-in to our broadcast audio buses, with the captions piped into the YouTube live players as a sidecar track viewers could toggle on or off. The accuracy was around 98% across the day. That is high enough that we got positive feedback from three remote attendees who specifically rely on captions, which we passed on to the captioning team.

The post-production package was the part the client cared about most. We started editing during the event. Same-day cuts of the morning sessions began rendering during the lunch break, with our two editors working from the ISO recordings to produce per-speaker breakouts for the 14 talks across the three rooms. The full package (highlight reel, per-speaker cuts with branded lower-thirds, full-show recording per room, and a presenter-specific deliverable for each speaker to share on their own channels) landed with the client 36 hours after doors closed.

What went well: stream uptime was 100% across all three rooms, peak concurrent viewers were 1,400+ across the day, and the conference’s post-event survey scored the streaming experience higher than the in-room one for the first time. What we’d do differently: one of the breakout rooms had a presenter mic positioning issue that took 90 seconds to correct because the operator was momentarily watching the room next door’s stream. Resolved with a tighter brief for the multi-room ops on the next gig.

The client’s quote after we delivered the post package was that we were the first AV partner to make their streaming feel as polished as their in-room experience. That’s the bar we wanted to set, and it’s the bar we measure every multi-room event against now.